Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives

Cecil Court was exactly what Victor had said it was and no more, which meant it was considerably more than what that description had led me to expect.

A narrow lane off St. Martin's Lane, tucked between larger streets with the particular unobtrusiveness of things that don't need to announce themselves. The shopfronts were old in the way that London's old things were old...not preserved, just persisting, the paint and wood worn to the specific honesty of something that had survived because it fit where it was and not for any more complicated reason than that.

Victor walked in front.

Not because he was leading, exactly. More because he was the one who knew where he was going and had decided that if he was going to do this he was going to do it with a posture, which required being slightly ahead of the group and maintaining a certain forward-facing quality to his expression.

I watched the back of his head and said nothing.

"The bookshop's been here since the early 1700s," he said, not looking back. "Technically it's changed ownership twice, but the stock overlaps. The same edition of a Newton correspondence has been in the window for eleven years."

"How do you know that?"

"I walk past it."

"How often do you walk past Cecil Court?"

He paused.

"Frequently," he said.

Behind me, from the direction of Eva, a quiet sound.

Not quite a laugh.

The kind of sound where she is finding something very enjoyable and has decided not to disrupt it by being obvious about it.

....

The morning had the feeling that London mornings have in early spring…..cold in a way that was more atmosphere than temperature, the grey-gold light sitting between overcast and clear, the kind of light that makes things look like they belong somewhere old.

Eva walked to my left.

Éve walked to my right.

They were not doing anything, technically. They were simply walking, one on each side, occasionally close enough that our arms touched when the lane narrowed. Eva had her hair loose and was carrying the small bag she'd taken out from somewhere it's as if she always had a bag just it had never been explained.

Éve was braiding a section of her dark green hair at her own pace without looking at it, which was a gesture that suggested she had done it approximately ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more.

"This city smells like iron and rain," Éve said, not to anyone in particular.

"That's accurate," I said.

"And old paper."

"That's probably the bookshop."

She looked at me sideways. The calm sideways look she used when she found something either interesting or amusing and hadn't decided which yet.

"I like it," she said. Simply.

She went back to braiding.

....

I looked at Éve. She was watching a window display with the expression she reserved for things that interested her full attention, no affect, the attention that felt like it could take the thing apart into components and put it back together differently if it chose to.

"See something you like?" I said.

She didn't look at me immediately.

"The woodwork on these frames is jointed without nails," she said. "Someone did that by hand."

"Impressive."

"Mm." She glanced at me, then. The corner of her mouth moved. "You have the same kind of attention sometimes. When you're interested in something."

"Do I."

"It gets very quiet. The expression doesn't change much but the attention sharpens." She held eye contact for a moment. "It's rather striking."

I held her gaze.

"I learned from good examples," I said.

Éve looked at me for another half-second, then looked away. Not dismissively. The look saying she received something and decided to keep it, and doesn't intend to discuss it further.

She had the faintest colour in her cheeks that the cold alone couldn't fully explain.

....

Victor, three steps ahead, had slowed fractionally.

He had not turned around.

He was doing the thing where he was paying a very focused attention to the middle distance while clearly processing something in his peripheral vision. His jaw was set at the specific angle of a man who has Thoughts he is choosing not to share.

Mariabell, walking beside him, observed all of this with a calm precision like a scientist monitoring a predictable experiment.

She pinched him on the arm. Clean and efficient, without breaking her stride.

"Awww!"

Victor produced a short sound and turned to look at her with the expression of someone deeply wronged.

"What was that for?"

"You were making a face," she said not very pleasantly.

"I was not making a face."

"You were making the face, Vic. The one where you're thinking very loudly and it leaks out through your eyebrows."

He turned forward again. Deliberately. With dignity.

"My eyebrows," he said, with great precision, "do not leak."

....

Eva found the Newton correspondence in the window before we even went in.

She stopped, tilted her head, and spent a moment reading the visible title through the glass with a focused attention since it interested her…

Though in her case, she was nearly interested in everything, but with books it had something else, as though she were deciding whether this one had been waiting for her specifically.

"That's the one Victor mentioned," I said.

"Mm." She didn't look away from it. "Eleven years in the window and no one has bought it."

"He said the same."

"That means either everyone who comes here already knows it's there," she said, "or no one who comes here needs it. Both are interesting." She looked at me. "Which do you think?"

"I think someone put it there once and forgot."

Eva considered this seriously for a moment. Then a small smile.

"Sad," she said, and didn't mean it in a heavy way. Just observed, accurate, and filed.

I held the door for her.

She slipped inside with a natural ease of like she belonged in old bookshops, which Eva did, the same way she belonged in old forests and quiet courtyards and any space that had been unhurried long enough to develop its own kind of patience.

"Thank you," she said, softly, as she passed.

The way she said it was very small and very sincere and not about the door.

....

Inside the shop, the smell was exactly what Éve had identified from the street old paper, the compound of dust and leather and ink that accumulated in a place over decades and stopped being smell and started being atmosphere.

Victor went immediately to the back section.

He did not browse. He moved with directness as he knew where the thing he wanted was and had been politely pretending he didn't for the last forty minutes.

I watched him.

"You've been here before," I said.

"I said I walk past it."

"That's not the same as never going in."

He stopped in front of a shelf and looked at me over his shoulder. The expression of a man making a calculation.

"There's a folio edition of Paracelsus here," he said. "From the 1580s. I've been arguing myself out of it for months."

"Why?"

"Because I don't have anywhere to put it."

"Victor," I said. "You live in a house that has a room you refer to as 'the second library.' "

He looked at the shelf. Then at me.

"The second library," he said carefully, "is at capacity."

"Then we'll get you a third one."

....

Mephistopheles had drifted to a section on Continental philosophy. This was not unexpected.

She was reading the spine of something without pulling it from the shelf, she engaged with things she wasn't sure she wanted she measured first then committing to it after.

Aisha was near the front of the shop, standing with a quietness she had in spaces she found genuinely restful. She wasn't reading anything. Just present in the room, which for Aisha meant she was getting something from it.

Liliana had picked up something with a red cover, looked at three pages, and put it back. Then picked up another one. This process appeared to be the activity itself rather than preparation for anything else.

I watched her.

She caught me watching and held up the second book toward me like a question.

"Anything good?" I said.

"This one has dragons," she said. "I'm going to assume that they're wrong about everything."

"Probably."

"I'm getting it anyway." She tucked it under her arm with a decisive satisfaction of a decision made. Then she tilted her head and looked at me with the look she used when she was about to say something she had been thinking for a while.

"You're doing better," she said.

The tone was light. The content was not light.

"Than this morning?" I said.

"Than whenever you put on that face." She nodded at the glasses. "The one where everything is a problem that needs solving before you're allowed to stop thinking."

I adjusted the frames. Habit born after getting conscious of it. She watched the gesture with attentiveness, I prefer she didn't pay that much attention to it.

"Old book smell is good for that," I said.

"Hm." She held eye contact for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then she looked back at the book under her arm, satisfied. "Also me. I'm also good for that."

"I know," I said.

"Good," said Liliana Lucifer, Princess of Hell, youngest daughter of Lucifer, with a composure of a woman who had just confirmed something important and saw no reason to be modest about it.

....